This week I will upload some concept art of places and creatures described on the novel. I am not a professional artist, but I hope that those Blender-made renders will help the readers to imagine the world I have created for Necromancy! :)

This chapter deals with the basic lore and mythology that fuels the world of Úrim and everything that happens in Necromancia: The first Era. I hope that you enjoy it!

Translation is set to end around july 31 of this same year :)

2. Ginnungagap, Creation, Protohistory and Regenesis

What I have
gathered after covering most of the mythology of Úrim is that all races agree
in something: beyond the stars we see at night and the planets that have been
discovered past the moon, Nibiru and Antichthón, our mirror planet at the back
of the Sun, there is an infinite nothingness.

All that
exists now in the surface and the deeps of Úrim, according to the myths of old,
was born into the Great Void Ginnungagap and at some point in time, everything
will return in the end. In the tongue of the Sons of Ivaldir, Ginnungagap means
the Yawning Abyss. Some other names have been given to it: Primeval Abyss, the
Great Yawn and, finally, some people call it The Great Devourer. A lot of legends
claim that the Black Hole has devoured a hundred galaxies and planets on its
path. Ginnungagap, it is believed, is the beginning and the end of each and all
universes.

Be that as
it may, the myths do agree in this: At some point, a word manifested itself
inside the Ginnungagap, and from it the almighty will of Kósmon was born.
Kósmon, the God, the Only One, the Great Father had given birth to himself
inside the Void, and his existence, born from the debris of countless planets
and stars, made the Abyss come to an almost complete halt. Kósmon noticed he
had the power of creation, and that every word he uttered was different from
the past one. Kósmon, the Divine Spark, the great Maker, was the first entity
in the universe with a will, and he filled the Void with planets, moons and
stars and set in motion the universal machinery. It gave its laws to physics
and to magic its power, linking it to the Ginnungagap. From it, magic would
drain its power, and the void would return a part of what it had consumed in
its life.

With a
second, greater effort he created a world and he named it Úrim, and set apart
sky from the earth and the sea; he divided light from the darkness and
established the four elements. According to the myths, in this gigantic
continent untouched by water, their creatures thrived. Finally, Kósmon, in a
great love act, created all the races in the world, to the image of some of the
materials found in the world: some, like orcs and dwarves, were created from
creatures that lived in the mud; giants were raised and embodied from deep
beneath the sea. Men were made out of fire and elves from the wind. Those
primitive creations were granted a soul, an agent that animates matter and that
could or could not return to the Ginnungagap, from where they were extracted in
the first place. Kósmon noticed that with each passing second, he had to make a
greater effort to make things happen. The more tongues he created, the more
difficult it was for him to remember each one. His energy started to fade and,
though he could have stopped everything, it would have meant to freeze his
creations forever. The Maker knew that the day would come when he would sleep
forever. But he was happy with the races and the order he brought to the
universe– to the Cosmos.

Giants, divided
in both males and females, represented the creation’s highest thoughts.
Dwarves, which were closer to earth, represented the life cycle of plants: The
seeds germinated on the earth’s womb. They also represented patience, since
only through it could the legendary, golden, diamond-like shine halls of
Bael-Ungor be born. It is said that the machines and forges there shadowed even
those crafted on our own era. Orcs and Humans represented the vital spark of
things, the principle of movement; a constant that has led them to war,
destruction and greed. Elves were the middle ground of creation. They
understood all of this, but they were not inclined to any of it. Kósmon saw the
essence of each race, satisfied, and created mirror images of them and called
them Guardians: Odin for Dwarves; Nut for the Elves; Quetzalcóatl for Men,
Yog-Sothoth for Orcs and Ishtar for the Giants. Guardians, adored by their
people, guided their people to an era of glory but, as Kósmon himself, they
became tired. This mythical era in which gold rained, the moon moved freely and
Kósmon, the Guardians and Úrim’s races spoke with each other as children do
with their parents is called the Protohistory.

But this
primeval bliss would not last.

Men and
Elves; Orcs, Dwarves and Giants met at the Garden of Kósmon and there was war
between them. They all thought that their Guardian was the one true god, and
the Guardians, confused, surrounded by screams and blood, filled with pride.
Brothers fought brothers and became each other’s curse. Guardians thought of
themselves as the One True Maker and disregarded Kósmon, for their power was
too great. Mothers ate their children and fathers interbreed with their
daughters. No distinction was made between the dead and the living, which were
deprived of flesh and effects. And there came a three-cycle winter called
Fimbul which covered the hearts of all immortal races of Úrim. Many creatures
died and the world was purged of any and all vestiges of compassion and love.
Kósmon, who was already too tired, saw all this and wept. Then came the
Protowar.

The dwarven
skald Radsvinn Ivaldsson, a Protohistory enthusiast himself, wrote in a
stone tablet —known as the Tablet of the Past— who he then gifted to his
son, Einar Radsvinnsson, the following text:

The land of Eisgrind, previously named
Grinland, was home to as many trees and animals as the Glitnir forest, and its
mountains greened with each cycle. From Bael-Ungor to [...] an endless sea of
oaks and poplars covered what today is the permafrost of Eisgrind, and the
birds sang […] along the beasts of the land. Our fathers met creatures […]. At
night, a long row of torches was lit and guided travelers from the entrance of
Bael-Ungor to its core. Men and orc alike came to our taverns. The crystals at
the caves greeted each day a new wanderer and they did not tire, nor the stones
knew how not to rejoice when they met an old, long unseen friend. At the
heart of [Bael-Ungor’s Fortress, deep] within the mountains, a colossal statue
[…] meter high, in a vault […] the image of our Father Odin. I speak to you, my
son, Einar Radsvinsson, of an Era of peace as Úrim will never see again; of the
city that we lost, of the creatures of old; of the forests that died buried by
our […].

I am not
able to tell you, and it is not in my hands to judge who […]. The truth is that
the armies of Bael-Ungor did not hesitate in excavating under the forest the
pit that would sink it forever; the grave that would extinguish the life of
Grinland forever. We did not hesitate in erecting the hills that gave that
cursed name, Eisgrind, the Ice Gate, to our land. When Orcs marched from the
western coasts, it was as if some wolves had devoured the sun and the moon. Men
and Giants lost their way in Fimbul. Only the Stars, and the Stars alone,
could save the Elves and the rest of us from freezing over. We were shielded
inside the Mountain’s stony ribs. Ivaldir, my father, forged a mighty war horn
which he called Gjallarhorn to […] war. Men […] in Quetzalcóatl’s feathers. We
did not know […] Men fired immense fireballs from its entrails. Their power […]
to burn for entire days.

Giants diverted an entire sea and the
forests of Grinland started to wither away. […] the enormous desert of the
South. But it was not them who razed […] Grinland. 15,000 dwarves dug every day
and every night. They dug until their hands bled and […]. 2,000 kilometers to
the south they dug and three to east and west; they dug until Nut, [infuriated,
made stone] impenetrable and they could advance no more. However […].
Everything was a giant tunnel web that held the trees’ roots as ceiling. And a
thousand times [7,000 chains] were forged, […] tree was chained together. And
we created a gigantic machine —as big as Bael-Ungor’s own entrails— to pull
them all with a single move. The Men of the East attacked and they were stopped
by the bjørn.[1]
Wave after wave crashed in our crags […]. When the first enemy touched the base
of the mountain Bael-Ungor, Gjallarhorn was blown. We activated the machine and
we let the mountain slide over them. And the device devoured the chains […] the
foundation of the forests itself, dragging the bodies of our attackers. Seven
million lives ended in an instant. We had defended our home, though we lost,
for all eternity, the [comfort of the forest.] For Odin did not allow trees to
grow again, so that we understood the true nature of our actions. The
[primeval] forest that covered the whole continent of Úrim was divided and in
its place were left the southern Sharran desert, Glitnir and Eisgrind, the ice
gate. From then until now, a thousand cycles after the [Gjallarhorn was blown],
we have endured the perpetual winter of Eisgrind.

The
recovered stone tablet quotes sources now gone from the surface of Úrim and all
of its continents. Kósmon wept his children and named this conflict, the
Primeval War, —renamed by historians as the Protowar—, a time of Wolves and
Axes. Then he washed the hands and the feet of his sons but left their memories
untouched so they could remember with a painful amount detail, what they had lost
and the damage they caused to the world. He also made death —molded after his
own weariness, but greater in degree— to descend upon the once immortal races;
elves, his favorites from above all else, which lived in a blessed
garden, were given not bodily death, but systematic oblivion. He punished the
Guardians and incinerated them for 21 days straight. On the 22nd day, he mixed
the dust of his failed creations and bled his penis over them. And he made them
whole again, inferior, enslaved to his will, weaker each day until the day came
when they disappeared altogether.

Regenerating
valleys, mountains and forest, as well as all the flora and fauna that
inhabited them; seeding all the races anew along their Guardians exhausted
Kósmon, and he fell in the Sleep of Death that he himself created as a
punishment for his sons. Kósmon, the Creator, would sleep forever, and the
Guardians would be forced to watch over him and all the races of Úrim. The
remake and rebirth of the Guardians is known since as the Regenesis. All mortal
races were expelled from Kósmon’s earthly plane and forced to roam Úrim so they
sought a life for themselves and so they might be forgiven for their actions.

Almost all
historians agree that the Protohistory ends just before the birth of Ivaldir
Odinsson. There are two powerful reasons to consider so: First, that the races
of Úrim would wander, since then, and would cause conflicts and great world
alterations —greater even than those of the Protohistory, of course— and,
second that up until that point there are no written records whatsoever. The
first witness records of “what happened then” are registries scattered through
the First Era. The defeat of Nergal would also fuel an interest for the past.
Unfortunately, the dwarves were the only race that kept a fragment of that
epoch, written at a time that was far too close to the Regenesis. Humans, orcs
and giants lost any memories of this Era of bliss, called bitterly, since then,
the Protohistory. Almost everyone forgot what happened after that.

Some events
and findings have made most of my peers to reconsider exactly how mythic is, in
fact, the Protohistory: the rise of the technomages during the Fourth Era and
the Prototypes on the Second one; the discovery of the ruins of Lemuria; the
remnants of Bael-Ungor, Uruk, Dhabi, Thorsheim and Jotunheim; the lost
registries of the Second Session of the Academy that recount some of the events
of the First Era; the resurgence of alchemy —and, for that matter, the
verification of some of the most unbelievable recipes recorded in The
Chemical Wedding—; the diviners and esoteric and rumors of ghosts in
abandoned houses are just some of the hundreds of thousands of daily
occurrences. All these seem to be the echoes of an epoch frozen in time that
struggles to break a seal.

The following work bounds together in a
single tome all that is known about the First Era and the things that happened
then.

[1]Bjørns are the dwarves’ finest warriors. Covered from head
to toe with steel armors and bear pelts, bjørns were trained since childhood in
melee combat as well as offensive geomancy. However, most of what is remembered
today about them are legends, such as the one of the mighty dwarf bjørn
Hangatyr Nordstein from the Second Era. After the clans Runnenseele and
Nordstein separated –this will be narrated in the next chapter–, the bjørn
disappeared from the annals of Gal’Naar. They would be rediscovered during the
Second Era.

domingo, 5 de junio de 2016

Idle reader: Today, technology has infiltrated every single aspect of our daily lives in Úrim, and I fear most of the things I may divulge here may be taken as quackery. Almost 2,000 cycles have passed since Úrim saw the last mage over its surface. I know that in many places this text will be taken as a joke; as a game, maybe, or as the results of an academic maddened by his experiments and studies. Unfortunately, I also know that there are people out there that will take it deadly serious, and that these people will try to sink this recollection of events once again and pretend that none of this ever happened. And I will say to them: Ignorance is never the savior of any people. Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. It is my duty as a Great Brother of the Academy to provide you with this book, that clearly opposes with the official version of the facts.

There was a time in which the magic that we know now, a mockery from circuses and theaters, dominated the hills in times of the dwarven king Skallargrim Einarsson Runnenseele, fallen in the Great War. This magic traversed the spine of the first three Eras. The last giants, born at the end of the Third Era, and now extinct, witnessed the last days of the Pyromancers of the South. The orcs remember proudly the myths of the Legions, but highly doubt the power of the Electromancy. And they are not to blame. Though the legends of old is filled to the brim with tales of magic and we know great monuments of the past, people today do not believe such tremendous powers to have ever existed.

For over 40 cycles I have scourged the libraries of Iunu-Ra and Shurub’Gul, the most reliable ones and second only to the burnt library of Jotunheim, in which thousands upon thousands of writings were lost. I did so searching for data that might forgive what has been written here. I have gathered here, broadly, the legends and the myths of the people of Úrim. they have been treated with the corresponding seriousness.

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Several local rumors have been dismissed for being too fantasious or for the inability to verify them, as is almost always the case of myths, but they are added anyways for I firmly believe that they might hold a dose of truth. In a particular note, there are exaggerations with the fall of Lemuria but only in myth did we preserve any semblance of truth about this event. Any other registry about the giants, their customs and traditions were lost with the fall of Úruk with the arrival of the Destroyers in the Third Era. The rediscovery of a fragment of the Elegy of Water in the ruins of this same city of Lemuria, which was thought as inexistent until 1740, has helped my colleagues to reconstruct the last days of the orcs of Muul-Kuth during the First Era and the worldview of the atlanteans.

I fear I have not been completely factual in the redaction of this general history of events of the planet we know as Úrim. In some chapters I might have added more relevance to certain events that what they might have had in the continents’ past and some others, therefore, are minimized. A number of my peers have helped me to reduce the margin of error along the text, even without any knowledge of what the final intention of this work was. Several others even tried to determ me and spoke of the possible consequences of it; consequences that would not only affect me or the Third Session of the Academy, but all of the races of Úrim. I beg all of them for their pardon, for I know that I have betrayed more than one. I hope that those that know me will understand in time that the vital impulse of truth moved me to this, to spreading the true course of events long before the Censor - an event that, I am sure, most of my brothers are unaware of. In the other hand, it is undeniable, that the discovery of the ruins of Lemuria, the Ætherforge and similar events within our very same Era will speak louder and clearer if set within the proper context.

As said earlier, I have taken part with a lot of standpoints, and several others were discarded along the way. Some people, like the dwarves, hold a special place within my heart and I fear this has had some influence, though I hope minimal, in how I present the facts to the reader. I rescued part of the poem The loss of Bael-Ungor that survived within the bibliotheques of the giants. This old dwarven chant sings the exile of the sons of Ivaldir from deep within the kingdom of stone. The parts I could not rescue I had to mend with the songs heard in the taverns of Úrim. If it is faithful or not to the works of the dwarven skald Radsvinn Ivaldsson, we may never know. The original orthography has been updated, but the rest remains unaltered. Several verses have gone missing with the centuries and only a fragmentary version remains. Only the wind knows what was truly written.

May my hand never tire

of carving the loss that you suffer;

may no one who sings your story a thousand times remain proud;

but rather, that those who,

upon seeing you do not feel burdened,be cursed with a thousand deaths and tears.

Alone they stand, and mute your hammers.

Alone, too, your forges.

Naked, without a cuirass,

your quivers with tears loaded;

we left your halls behind

and with them we unearth our ills.

Bael-Ungor, may your father Odin

[…] our, that […] same

[…] in darkness fits;

in your earth, no […] gorge;

[…]

Let them grieve for you as we do.

May the orcs grieve for you

as children do for their mothers;

may their eyes devour your walls;may their songs be pierced

by the silence imposed upon you,

with [...] that I am a witness of.

That the men, at night,

may not find a fire within your forges

that does not craft your runes of might;

[… ambers] outpour,

like the silent stars[…]the moons,

your [light] upon your back;

their heat upon your onyx garland.

May every single giant cry the name

of Bael-Ungor; may they never forget;

that their weeping rollers

[sing your glory; may]the mighty song

that they erect for you[never be] cut silent;

May they weep and grieve with us.

May the forest elves

put to silence their great oak-trees

when this hymn of yours their branches break;

may your regret, Bael-Ungor, reach

the fluor they use to craft their meals;

may they learn to mourn our clans this way.

May your towers never lose

their silver and their gold, oh city lost!

Never may their shine be erased.

Many dwarves their lives left at your gates;Now we are lost,

and we are a net, and salt, and sea and oars.

I publish this, knowing that the only thing I can hope for is death, and though I do not fear whatever destiny may befall upon me, for I have lived more than any of my contemporaries, I do worry for the books preserved in many of the bibliotheques of Úrim. They might try to destroy material that survived until the end of the Third Era. Fortunately, by the time this work is published, many of them will not be in the chambers of Toledo, nor within the halls of Shurub’Gul; nor guarded anymore among the mountains that the dwarves sheltered.

I speak here of the past of Úrim that several Courts and Sessions of the Academy had agreed it was best to forget and, as a true member of the Academy, I had to start from the beginning: what is a cycle, the name of the months, the geography and what is known, up to this point, about magic and the giants. Many of the names that had fled from the memory have returned to warn us once again: We must not tinker with forces unknown. The actual state of Antikythera and the rest of the regions of Muspel, Utgard, Vinland and the lands of Thule have me pushed me to this. In any case, time will tell if I was mistaken or not.

I hope that the Guardians may help Úrim to save itself from the path of self-destruction it has traversed from the last decade on. My wish, after all, is that this text warns us all. I am an old, tired man. Throughout my life I have seen how, once again, the stability of the planet has been fractured.I will die without any hopes of seeing peace, but with a burning longing for it. I know that the future prosperity will be founded upon my corpse and the corpses of coming generations. In this work my life, my passion and my transit on earth have been bound together. And with this, I hope that Kósmon might grant you health and peace. And may he never forget me. VALE.